Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (63 page)

Zelda
had
begun a new novel with insanity as its theme. She divulged to Rennie that she wanted to create a view of madness so close to normality that readers would not see the difference. The clever plot shows a married couple driven to a mental clinic by their scheming daughter, but not till the conclusion do readers discover that the couple are already patients inside the asylum. Later Zelda refocused the novel on the schizophrenia of Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover and main male dancer with his Ballets Russes.
40

Determined that Zelda should not proceed with this book, Scott encouraged her to paint. It was at La Paix that Zelda had her first professional painting studio, where many of her strongest ballet paintings were done between 1932 and 1934.

Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt, who visited La Paix, were
shocked both by their friends’ appearances and by Zelda’s
paintings
. ‘Both Scott and Zelda had lost the fresh, well-scrubbed look that marked them in their youth,’ said the younger Sara. ‘[Scott had] developed flabby arms and a fat pot … Zelda was immaculate … [but] [h]er once lustrous blond hair had taken on a dull red-gold tint; her skin, a grayish pallor.’ Zelda found it hard to converse with her friends. ‘Beyond an exchange of Confederate amenities with Sara and me and an occasional inquiry about her family and friends in Montgomery, Zelda’s conversation was confined almost wholly to her painting. A corner of her eye twitched, and her mouth twisted from nervous strain when she spoke,’ said young Sara:

Both Saras felt that to see the Fitzgeralds at La Paix while remembering early days in Montgomery was ‘like reading a palimpsest on which a stark Greek tragedy had been written over the faint traces of a romantic comedy … it was not the way to spend a pleasant afternoon.’
42

Scott later sold two of Zelda’s paintings from this period to Sara Haardt on Zelda’s behalf. Though Sara Mayfield later saw the receipt, dated 1932, amongst Sara Haardt’s papers, the paintings were never recovered. Whether Zelda knew is not clear. Judging by her generous gifts to other friends, including the Murphys and Sandy Kalman, she would have been more likely to have
given
them to Sara.

Zelda’s most important oil painting to date, the mannerist
Ballet
Figures,
was to be shown at New York’s Anderson Galleries for the American Art Association’s Spring Salon in May 1933: the first known public showing of her art. That afternoon, when Zelda was excitedly telling her friends about the event, Scott interrupted them, and asked Sara Haardt to look over his manuscript of
Tender
(
currently
called ‘Dr Diver’s Holiday’). Sara Mayfield remembers him pounding on the table as he shouted: ‘And it’s good, good, good!’ She said he spoke ‘as if he were whistling in a cemetery to bolster
his own morale …. As if to reassure himself, he said, “It
is
good, isn’t it, Zelda?”’ Scott’s thoughtlessness in inviting praise for fiction centred on Zelda’s mental condition became obvious to her friends only later. At the time they heard Zelda’s peal of irrelevant,
mirthless
laughter. ‘For a moment,’ recalled Sara Mayfield, ‘I thought Scott was going to slap her. Their eyes met and locked in a conflict that had rent them both … Anger flashed in the dead silence between them and then paled into inward desolation and despair.’ Scott, worried that Zelda’s friends would be embarrassed, said huskily: ‘She’s mad,’ then seeing their shocked faces, he quickly added: ‘Schizophrenia, the doctors say.’
43

Driving the women back to town, he attempted to justify himself. ‘He began by disparaging Zelda. Then he blamed her illness on her family, whom he taxed with bringing her up to be spoiled, selfish, and dependent … We tried half a dozen times to change the subject, but it was impossible to stop his scathing criticisms of Zelda and her family.’
44

In Baltimore Scott had taken to bursting in on Sara and Mencken at 704 Cathedral Street. Because of Sara’s operation they were not able to have children but, deeply in love, they had settled quietly into an affectionate routine. Mencken rose early and breakfasted alone at eight, believing that breakfasting with one’s spouse imposed an unnecessary hazard on marriage. Then they both wrote in separate rooms, Sara writing articles for
Country
Life,
before lunching together, after which Sara napped. Early evening
provided
them with what Mencken called ‘philosophical belching’ before dinner. Sara Mayfield said that they never exchanged a cross word. If an argument seemed imminent, they each retreated in silence to a separate room until calm could be restored.
45
Nothing could be more different from the Fitzgeralds’ row-riven lives.

Though Scott’s noisy drunken visits began to irritate the Menckens, as they had the Murphys and Hemingways, his
alcoholic
ravages concerned them.
46
Mencken managed to interest a doctor friend, Benjamin Baker, who tried to stop Scott drinking. Initially Scott entered Johns Hopkins in August 1932 with a
tentative diagnosis
of typhoid fever,
47
but between 1933 and 1937 he was re-hospitalized eight times for alcoholism and for suspected
inactive
fibroid tuberculosis.

In September 1932 Scott summed up the year as a ‘strange year of Work & Drink. Increasingly unhappy – Zelda up and down. 1st draft of novel complete Ominous!’

While Scottie started a new dancing school in the fall, Zelda,
waiting anxiously for the publication of
Save
Me
The
Waltz,
worked on a lighthearted farce called
Scandalabra,
turning to it in relief when either her new novel or Scott’s criticisms became too heavy.

On 7 October
Save
Me
The
Waltz
was published at $2 with a minimum of publicity, printed on cheap paper, bound in green linen, with a tiny print run of 3,010 copies. The poor proofreading formed the bulk of the
New
York
Times’
s
negative criticism among mixed reviews.
48

Dorothea Brande in
The
Bookman
enlarged on this: ‘It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing … but they have not given the book the
elementary
services of a literate proofreader.’ Brande said if one persisted past the mistakes one came upon an earnest, honest, good story of a girl trying desperately to make a character for herself which will carry her through life. In the Judge Zelda had ‘drawn with loving care as fine a man as we have had in fiction for many a month’.
49

Several critics, ignoring the proofreading defects, gave it good reviews. William McFee in the New York
Sun
told readers: ‘here is a peculiar talent, and connoisseurs of style will have a wonderful time … there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction’. McFee, whose review Zelda considered ‘the only
intelligible
(to me) criticism of the book’, suggested that the effect of the accumulated fantastic metaphors was fascination. ‘Veteran
wordmongers
will read [it], with envy and a kind of dizzy delight … the book [has] an almost alcoholic vitality. Mrs Fitzgerald’s next novel will be an interesting event.’ Like most reviewers McFee thought the ballet sections towered above the rest, whilst the character of Alabama was insufficiently developed, resembling rather ‘an insane child’.
50

Some critics saw the novel as the last will and testament of a departed era that began as a bar-room ballad and ended as a funeral oration. The
New
York
Herald
Tribune
perceived Alabama as a heroine who ‘somersaults through the pages’ with a hardboiled experimentalist surface concealing an uncompromising
sentimentalist
. The
Tribune
suggested ‘the writing has a masculinity that is unusual: it is always vibrant and always sensitive’.
51

The subhead above a review that amused Zelda immensely ran ‘Mrs Fitzgerald’s First Novel Places Her On Scott’s Level’,
52
but amusement was curtailed by a realistic appraisal of the book’s finances. Fitzgerald’s contractual clause stipulating that half Zelda’s royalties up to $5,000 were to be credited against his
publishing
debt did him little good, for the novel sold fewer than 1,400
copies. Its earnings totalled a mere $120.73, for Zelda had to pay expensive proof revision costs. When Max sent Zelda the cheque he wrote: ‘Maybe I ought to have warned you about corrections for they came to a great deal. I knew they would, when the proofs began coming back, but I knew you wanted to get the book the way you thought it ought to be.’ This was a slight slip of the truth, for most of the revisions were incurred because Scott wanted to get the book the way
he
thought it ought to be. Max realized Zelda was sad: ‘The result won’t be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask you whether you were writing any more … but I do think the last part of the book in particular, was very fine; and that if we had not been in the depths of a depression, the result would have been quite different.’
53

Some of their established writer friends thought highly of the book. Malcolm Cowley wrote to Scott: ‘It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before. The women who write novels are usually the sort who live spiritually in Beloit, Wisconsin.’
54

Despite this praise, the overall financial failure of the book sent Zelda spiralling down again. She locked herself in her room and drove Scott mad with fury as she threw herself into her new novel, based on her own asylum experiences. Angrily Scott wrote to Dr Rennie that Zelda had negated her promise not to write any more fiction until he had finished his novel.

He drank instead of writing. She wrote instead of submitting, locking up her manuscript after every day’s work. They were
building
towards their biggest confrontation yet.